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Colin's Adventures In Sheepland
Milford Sound, New Zealand. Peaceful, pristine and beautiful. And where fat german tourists get on cruise boats, get too drunk for their own good, and irritate, to put it mildly, ahh hell, I think the most appropriate word is "traumatise", the other passengers.
First off, Milford Sound really is beautiful. They have the tallest waterfall in the continent
(if you can call Oceania a continent, it's really more like a lot of tiny little islands that
you couldn't fit a bed onto and about 3 or 4 relatively huge islands.), playful seals which
will messily devour fish for your viewing pleasure, and innocent-looking penguins that camouflage
perfectly and want your soul. There are 2 penguins in the photo on the right. If you can find
them, you win the right to challenge one of them in a fight for a dead fish.
Most of the time I was on the top deck getting blown around by the wind. It took lots of combing that night to get my hair not to look abnormal. A few of the passengers crouched under the lifeboat at the aft area and the rest were braving the wind at the forepart. Once in a while, the wind would pick up, and one of the poor fellows would be lifted up and slammed against the large box in the middle of the deck where the lifejackets were supposedly kept. Key word being "supposedly", because your confidence can be shattered when a box that's supposed to have all the safety equipment inside sounds hollow when people knock against it.
There was a very whiny group of Japanese tourists who stayed on the second deck, sheltered from
everything, throughout the whole trip. And when the whole boat went up to the outdoor deck to
see the Stirling Falls (the tallest as mentioned earlier, and the picture on the left below),
they went back in after 15 seconds
complaining that they were getting wet from the mist generated by the waterfall. Very little
exaggeration here. Okay fine, not mist, but a slight drizzle of water onto the top deck. But
still, not like they're gonna melt or anything. Anyway, the Japanese went back to the 2nd deck
and ate their instant soba noodles.
3 hours later, when everyone got off, we witnessed first-hand why the Germans were absent from all the festivities. A man and a woman were on a table, trying to satisfy each other while fully clothed, with spilt beer everywhere and the crowbar that was used to threaten the bartender leaning against the door to the toilet. The captain was on his handphone calling for a forklift truck to get rid of a really fat guy who had also drunk too much and was presumably German too.
There was a policeman just outside and once the captain was done with the forklift service he started talking to the policeman about what had happened and how bad their singing was. You can imagine, so I won't describe it. After getting on the bus back to the airfield, we passed the police station and the Germans were outside, still unable to stand up, and the fat guy was leaning on the shiny steel flagpole which was in danger of breaking.
In Sheepland 5, find out what happened when I went paragliding and which came first, the chicken or the egg.